Hipp & Kelley, Badmen

In the sparsely settled South after the Civil War the
James brothers were not the only desperados. Pairs or small
bands probably preyed on nearly every rural county for a
short period. The smarter ones would size up an area, make
one or two raids, then disappear.

In time a pair came to Butler
County, Alabama. A few highway robberies occurred on
lonesome stretches of road. The victims reported two masked
men, and recited their build. Said the two disappeared into
the virgin forest after taking whatever valuables there
were.

This was a short term
proposition, because men quickly began to move only in pairs
or groups and they armed themselves.

Then an old couple were found
murdered in their house. It is not known whether they were
robbed, but there was a general notion in the neighborhood,
unconfirmed, that they had gold in their house.

Fear gripped the community, and
weapons were readied at many a homestead.

The badmen lay low a few days,
and Sheriff Porterfield began organizing a posse. They next
robbed a payroll for a mill near Chapman, and killed the
messenger. Word went to Greenville by telegraph, and the
Sheriff and a few of the posse boarded the next train for
Chapman.

By the time he arrived a
lumberjack had brought word that he had seen the two at a
lumber camp some five miles out in the forest. He had
watched them steal food from the cook shack while everyone
was away in the woods.

A logging railroad had been laid
out to the camp for hauling in logs. Such roads were of
light rail, laid on the ground without ballast. When the
area served had been cut, the rails were extended, or taken
up, to serve another area. Small locomotives and light
trains traversed them at low speed.

A logging train was readied.
Sheriff and the train crew mounted to the cab. The other men
concealed themselves in a small utility car behind the
engine. Empty log cars trailed behind.

For some forty minutes they
steamed through the pine woods. A mile from the camp they
rounded a curve and there were two men, one on each side of
the track, armed with rifles. They flagged the train down;
then, while one covered from his position to the right and
in front, the second proceeded to board the engine.

It is not known what plan the
two had for the commandeered train and its crew, because as
soon as the man started to board he laid his rifle on the
floor of the gangway to climb up. Once this man was
temporarily disarmed, Porterfield shot the window out of the
cab with his Winchester, and dropped the one covering.
Before the man climbing aboard could recover he had a bullet
through his head, as did his companion out front. They must
have expected an unarmed train crew.

The wounded badmen were not
dead, but the rest was easy. They were loaded into the
utility car, and the log train backed to Chapman. They
backed very carefully, as the unloaded log cars could easily
jump the unballasted track.

The next train north carried
them to Greenville in the baggage car. They were hung right
there in Greenville, a few minutes after the train arrived.
No one seemed to think any other formalities were
necessary.

My grandfather saw the two lying
on the station platform in Greenville, one with “his
brains oozing out of his wound.” He did not see the
hanging. He was waiting for a train to Georgiana, which he
caught while somebody found ropes, and whatever else one
needs for a hanging.

I place the date as 1900 plus or minus two, but the
record could be cleared up, and maybe more details divulged.
The event is in some archive in Alabama. I first heard the
tale about 1932 or 1933 over a radio broadcast from a
Birmingham station. When I heard “Chapman” and
“log locomotive” I began to pay attention. Later
I asked my father about it, and he remembered the events
when he was a boy in Butler county, although he had never
mentioned it to me before. Also, I remember the words of the
recountings saying the man laid his gun on the pilot of the
locomotive, and proceeded to climb onto the front of the
engine. This seems so illogical that I retold it as above.
He would not have been able to confront and control the crew
from that position, nor accomplish anything else that I can
see.

The next time we visited Grandpa, we brought up the
subject and he told us he had been in Greenville when they
were brought in.

The locomotive could very well
have been Number 14, built in 1888, which was in Mr.
McGowan’s front yard a few years ago. I seem to
remember my father asserting that it was.

Number 14 is now at a
museum in Pike County, Alabama, near Troy. A plaque there
says it was made in 1881 for the Central Railroad and
Banking Company of Georgia, later the C-of-G Railroad. It
had a 5-foot wheel width, common for roads in the South at
that time. Also common to that day, it had a name, as well
as a number; “Madison” it was on the C-of-G. It
was converted to 4 feet 8⅝ inches, probably
for that Sunday in May, 1886, when all roads in the country
adopted the standard of the Roman Empire. My grandfather
recalled that day in Butler county.

At some unspecified time,
Number 14 was sold to the Empire Lumber Co. of
Andalusia. W. T. Smith Lumber acquired it when it bought
Empire in 1912. My father’s recollection of riding a
W. T. Smith locomotive must have been some other than
Number 14. He left Butler county in 1906.

That conversation led to tales of other bad men. One was
John Whitley, who for a short time worked at Rhodes’
Mill. He was known to be mean, but maybe he established a
criminal record after that.

Grandpa’s homeplace was
about a mile from the mill, on a road that ran along a ridge
above Persimmon Creek Swamp. A quarter mile further along
the road stood a log house where Great Grandfather had lived
until recent years. The log house was where the Whitleys
lived, John, his mother, a younger brother and maybe a
younger sister. They may have been squatters, found the
house vacant and moved in. In any event, John had to pass
the homeplace to get to the mill, and Aunt Bessie remembers
being afraid. (Aunt Bessie corrected the name for me after I
first set this down. I had remembered, Wesley, rather than
Whitley. She also remembered badman, Rube Burroughs. He, or
Hipp or Kelley broke into Uncles Dan and Newt’s
store.)

There was some dispute about
Whitley’s pay at the mill, and he came to the
homeplace to see Grandpa. His reputation was enough that
Grandpa put a pistol in his pocket before going to the front
yard. Of course Grandpa rejected his assertion that he had
been cheated. Then he moved toward Grandpa with a knife, but
the pistol kept him at bay. He walked out the gate with a
threat that they would meet on the road to Georgiana
sometime. Grandpa carried the pistol after that, until
Whitley wound up in jail or dead.

I recall a woman in the company
saying, “But you would not have killed him, would
you?” Grandpa said in his slow drawl, no emotion, just
responding, “I certainly would have killed him if he
had come one step closer or if he ever came toward me
again.” And he would have.

May 21, 1988: This past week I came onto a book,
Butler County in the Nineteenth Century, by Marylin
Davis Hahn of Birmingham. She devoted some four pages to an
account of John Hipp and Charley Kelley. Her source included
newspaper accounts at the time, and a photo of the two hung
to the columns on the court house. Her details differ from
mine in places, and she had additional information.

She dates the events
1891–92. Father (b. 1890) would not have
remembered the events; he must have remembered hearing talk
of the events when he was a child.

They first came to public
attention connected with illegal sale of whisky. Then a
Negro woman was murdered at the site of the present
Methodist Church in Georgiana; the motive of this crime was
not disclosed. Then a Georgiana merchant, Mr. Touart, was
murdered in his store, and his store was robbed, early in
the morning of September 9, 1891.

The old couple were Eliza L. and
Thomas Shepherd. They had recently sold a crop or herd or
something, and were thought to have the money at home. No
mention of gold. They were murdered with an axe in the early
part of the evening of November 1, a very bloody
affair, and their house ransacked.

A Colored couple named Moore
were suspected when bloody clothes were found in their
woodpile. They were released when blood analysis at Auburn
confirmed their claim that the blood was from a steer they
had butchered. (What blood analysis would have been carried
out in that day?)

Then one Tom Rhodes (a relative?
I had not heard of him before) was suspected. He had
disappeared after contracting to lease part of the Shepherd
land.

No evidence was stated that
linked Hipp and Kelley to this murder, but there may have
been some.

The last murder was that of the
Tax Collector, Charles Jacob (Jake) Armstrong. He was riding
circuit collecting taxes. He had spent the night with
Sellers, of Sellers’ Store, after collecting taxes for
that part of the county, then started out for Rocky Creek.
He was shot from ambush as he crossed Panther Creek. He may
have shot and wounded Hipp.

Panther Creek rises a mile
west of Georgiana, and flows southward into Persimmon Creek.
There is a Sellers community some two miles south of
Georgiana. Mohns Thornton’s daughter-in-law was a
Sellers, or else her grandfather was one; grandfather was
once minister at Wesley Chapel, she told me.

As was often the case in those days for Court House
incumbents, Armstrong was a one-legged Confederate Veteran.
Also, he had a wife and six children; the populace was
justifiably incensed.

Only twelve dollars appeared to
have been taken. Several hundred dollars in an inner pocket
was overlooked, and much of the collection was in
checks.

The sheriff was J. T. Birganier. A Captain
Porterfield was a member of the thirty man posse. (Captain
of what? The Confederate Army?) Others were Oliver Bryant,
Clink Williams, Tom Owens, and Dave Kern.

Hipp was captured when he attempted to board a Dunham
Lumber Co. train. He was wounded when he refused to
surrender and fired on the posse. He may have already been
wounded by Armstrong.

Dunham was south of Georgiana on
the L&N to Mobile, while Chapman is a comparable
distance north. I guess it was the location of Dunham Lumber
Co., it could have taken its name from the firm. My
grandmother’s father, Thomas Elmo Atkinson, may have
lived at Dunham about this time.

Kelly was arrested Christmas Eve five miles south of
Pineapple in Monroe County. He was hiding in a cotton house
owned by H. L. Solomon; Soloman and some neighbors captured
him. He was taken to jail in Greenville Christmas day.

It was the night of January 29, a month later, that
a hundred men got a deputy sheriff, also named Birganier, up
in the middle of the night and forced him to let them into
the jail. The next morning the badmen were found hanging
from the columns of the courthouse. A coroner’s jury
found “death by unlawful hanging,” and that the
two had been strung up and strangled; their necks were not
broken. There was some speculation that Hipp may have
already been dead from his wounds.

None of the hundred was
recognized nor found out.

Maybe Grandpa did see Hipp lying on the station platform
when he was brought in. There is nothing in Mrs.
Hahn’s account to deny that Porterfield shot the
window out of the locomotive, and who cares whether he was
Sheriff or not.

Mrs. Hahn’s book contained a good deal of
undigested data. Among such was a jury list for 1898 on
which Grandpa served. Greatgrandfather N. M. Rhodes was
on the tax roll for Precinct 2 in 1856, and a committee
member for Beat 2 of the Democratic and Conservative Party
in 1884.